Tradition/Innovation : Highlights

Tradition Innovation: American Masterpieces of Southern Craft and Traditional Art

Highlights

SAF notes with sadness the passing of American Masterpieces artist Clara Haluska Fodor of Tennessee on June 4. Born in 1920, she emigrated to New Jersey and her Stately Stitches series of quilted and embroidered wall hangings honored her new home country. She received the Tennessee Folklife Heritage Award at the 2003 Governor’s Arts Awards. View a video about Fodor, her artwork and her life produced by the Tennessee Arts Commission.

Conversation with the Curators

View statements from Kathleen Mundell and Jean McLaughlin

Conversation with the Curators

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Craftsmanship draws on a complex set of skills developed over a lifetime of practice. With “elegance and authority,” the contemporary and traditional artists featured in this exhibit have worked on refining these talents into a body of work. But such mastery involves more than just obtaining technical proficiency. It also calls for an understanding about materials, place, cultural practices and connections to both local and global communities. In the process, a foundation for creative work is built, as well as an understanding of ways of living in a particular place and time.

Some of the artists featured in Tradition/Innovation are rooted in a respect for traditional technique, materials and a connection to a specific place or culture. Others explore and expand ideas of form, function and community. Whether it be in the studio or at the kitchen table, each artfully balances skill, vision and tradition. Collectively, these works and their makers are part of our living artistic heritage, reminding us of the many creative ways to work and live.

Kathleen Mundell
Director, Cultural Resources, Inc.
Co-Curator: Traditional Arts

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Conversation with the Curators

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The South has attracted and nurtured hundreds of artists. Its educational institutions, landscape and community life have enabled creativity to flourish and artists to dig deeply into imagination and psyche to produce bodies of remarkable, original works. Through this exhibition, the mastery of craftsmanship is underscored, and individuality—the voice and fingerprint of the maker—is eloquently conveyed. Serious craftsmanship requires many years of attention to acquiring technical skills and facility with materials as well as a profound grasp of history and tradition. The works in this exhibition demonstrate the power of objects to tell an artist’s story of passion and commitment, of years spent mastering material and process, of keen observation and reflection, and a desire to bring others into the process through use, touch and dialogue.

Jean McLaughlin
Director, Penland School of Crafts
Co-Curator: Contemporary Crafts

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Around the Region

American Masterpieces...
around the region

Tradition/Innovation celebrates Southern masterworks of contemporary craft and traditional art, and the individuals who, living today in the South, create these often beautiful, sometimes unexpected and always compelling objects.

An initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts, presented by the Southern Arts Federation and a select group of museums, Tradition/Innovation invites you to share the heritage of the Southeast’s traditional arts and contemporary crafts, as well as to explore innovations within both artforms. Touring from March 1, 2008 through 2010, Tradition/Innovation will be hosted by partner museums in each of SAF’s nine partner states – view the touring schedule.

In Tradition/Innovation, you’ll experience works made by 58 of the South’s practicing master artists from the Southern Arts Federation’s nine partner states — Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. The artwork in the exhibit was selected by the artists in consultation with curators Jean McLaughlin and Kathleen Mundell . These pieces, some created as far back as the early 1970’s, some created in 2007, represent what the artists deem as their living masterpieces. Though no exhibit could include every master artist or masterwork of art in the region, we hope that Tradition/Innovation opens a door for you to a broad range of forms, materials and content.

The South is home to many traditional arts that families and communities continue to practice today. These visual arts, typically utilitarian, are usually deeply rooted, reflect a community aesthetic, and have experienced only modest change over time. Contemporary craft in the South, in comparison, also possesses its own rich history beginning with the folk school movement in the early 1900s, and has grown in range of expression with each individual artist. Artists have been, and continue to be, drawn to this region to learn and practice their chosen artforms. Throughout the exhibit you will find both parallels and contrasts in the lives and works of contemporary craftspeople and traditional artists.

The exhibit’s curators present these artworks to you in four sections: Cultural Practice, Relationship to Place, Innovation and Evolution, and Connections. These four sections are designed to share conversation between the curators with you; to give voice to the artists; to prompt your own questions and discoveries; and to illustrate some of the South’s most intriguing art.